Jiwo Paro was founded in 2014 with individual capital infusion.
Our mission is to enable rural women and youth achieve economic independence.
The organization provides sustainable credit options, market-led skills development and business learning to create an ecosystem that allowed for rural women and youth to thrive financially.
Our Co- Founders
Dancan Onyango and Akinyi Awora’s story each took a different path to getting them towards the creation of Jiwo Paro. A banker and a community development specialist came together to rethink the way rural women and youth tackle poverty by redesigning financial services for the bottom of the pyramid.
Dancan Onyango
Dancan has a progressive career in banking and financial inclusion consulting. He has worked for and with fast-paced organizations in Africa and Asian markets. He worked a digital financing consultant before making the change to creating financial solutions that enabled rural women and youth rethink solutions to poverty.
He is also a recipient of the President Obama’s & US State Department’s Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young Africa Leaders. Dancan holds a Bachelors of Commerce and certifications on Financial Inclusion and Public Policy, Innovation for Economic Development both from Harvard Kennedy School, and a Business and Entrepreneurship from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. His countries of work experience include Kenya, Cambodia, Nigeria Cote D’Ivoire and Tanzania.
He is currently an MBA candidate at Babson College
Akinyi Awora
Akinyi’s life’s work is dedicated to designing solutions that disrupt the way the world thinks about development. Her philosophy ‘Lead with Love’ is the driving force behind her campaign to end poverty by infusing every solution we come up with the inherent belief that all human beings deserve to live with dignity above all else. She has worked towards organizing young people to take lead in rethinking our approaches towards sustainable development.
Akinyi has worked as design thinking consultant helping businesses, civil societies and public servants design products and programs built for impact. Prior to co-founding Jiwo Paro, she founded Learning Growth Africa, a pan-African network of African youth dedicated to leapfrogging African learning systems into the future. She is a Mandela Washington Fellow, a #IamRemarkable trainer, an Africa Youth for SDG’s Champion, SDG and a relentless force in advocating for sustainable development. She also is the chairperson Kisumu Youth Business Leaders Guild.
She holds a BA in Community Development from Maasai Mara University. Akinyi attended a global leadership program at Howard university, receiving a certificate in Civic Leadership and public management